Contribution of copy number variants to schizophrenia in East Asian populations.

Rare CNVs are significantly associated with schizophrenia in East Asian populations, with 14 loci identified, including 8 novel genome-wide significant loci.

• Why it matters: Understanding genetic risk factors across diverse populations is crucial because most studies have focused on European ancestry, potentially missing population-specific variants linked to schizophrenia.
• What they did: The study analyzed 20,903 cases and 23,258 controls from East Asian populations, identifying nine significant CNV loci and performing meta-analysis with European data to find additional loci.
• The result: New rare CNVs in East Asians show higher carrier frequencies (0.38%) than Europeans (0.0017%), highlighting the importance of including diverse populations to fully understand schizophrenia genetics.